Spotify claims launch of Apple Music has helped it grow

Other, smaller players will eventually have to leave the streaming music business, according to one of Spotify's most senior executives

General atmosphere view at Spotify presents An Intimate Evening With Shane McAnally at the Rosewall on November 2, 2014 in Nashville, Tennessee (Jason Davis/Getty Images)

The launch of Apple Music has actually helped out Spotify, it has claimed.

Many had worried that Apple’s relative clout – as well as the fact that it can do things like pre-install its music app on all iPhones – would mean that Spotify could face trouble from Apple’s competitor. But since Apple Music was launched in June last year the company’s growth has actually sped up.

Spotify has said that the launch of Apple Music has simply served to raise the profile of streaming music services and helped the other companies that are in the market.

"It's great that Apple is in the game. They are definitely raising the profile of streaming. It is hard to build an industry on your own," Jonathan Forster, a vice president and one of its first employees, told Reuters.

"Since Apple Music started we've been growing quicker and adding more users than before.

"It would be terrible if we were just taking each other's users or to learn there was just a ceiling of 100 million users - I don't think that is the case.”

But Mr Forster said that it couldn’t be the case that there was a large number of streaming companies in the coming years. As well as Spotify and Apple Music, other smaller companies like Tidal and SoundCloud have launched their own streaming services.

"My Internet history would tell me that there's probably not going to be that many significant players, and then maybe smaller niche cases ... maybe there could be a classical music streaming service," he told Reuters. "It's a hard business."

Spotify has 30 million users, making it far bigger than any of its competitors. But Apple Music has been growing quickly, and it recently announced that it has 13 million users – all of which are paying subscribers, since it doesn’t offer a free option as Spotify does.

Mr Forster also said that Spotify is looking to branch out into other businesses like merchandising, and video – an area that Apple Music has already pushed into, with exclusive rights to a Taylor Swift concert film and rumours that it is working on other original content.

Spotify has had a complicated relationship with Apple Music since it came out. Shortly after the service was launched, he tweeted “Oh ok.” – a message that was later deleted and went unexplained.

Apple came relatively late to music streaming, after trying other approaches like cloud-based music libraries and a focus on buying music through iTunes. But it came to the market with a – as well as an existing framework through its own iTunes and the purchase of Beats, it pushed Apple Music through heavy advertising spends and pre-installing the app on all iOS and Mac OS devices.

Since it was launched, Apple Music has faced some criticism because of what some people have said is a confusing and difficult interface. It is said to be re-designing that app ready for its big developer conference in June, where it will get a simplified design and have some of its less-used features scaled back.